Murder at the Manor?

The tension rose in the room at the prospect of the imminent reveal, the atmosphere thick with suspicion and fear. Candles flickered, almost mocking the six assembled guests. They knew what was coming; someone’s fate is about to change forever. The rain outside suddenly fell hard, clattering against the windows of the old Manor like machine gun fire, startling some of those seated around the old, wooden dining table. Wind rattled the bushes, and the trees shook violently from one side to the other.

Five of the guests were sat in a horseshoe arrangement, made up of two old, battered leather sofas, and a worn armchair. A coffee table sat in the middle cluttered with old books and tea cups. The sixth guest - Marcus - pacing nervously up and down the room. Felix, the oldest of the assembled guests, told him to sit down. He didn’t listen.

To their left a door opened with a long creaking sound. In walked Detective Inspector John McGavin. The scene called for someone with perhaps more gravitas, but they would have to make do with the short Detective’s male pattern baldness and mostly grey beard. I understand it was a recent promotion, having just done a stint as the Chief Constable’s driver.

He wasn’t on the murder squad, no, he just happened to be staying at the Manor when the grisly crime took place, and took charge.

He stopped to look at each of the six assembled guests. He removed his pocket notebook from the inside of his tweed jacket and took a pencil out from the other. He flipped open the book.

“My investigations bring us here to this moment, a reckoning for one of you in this room,” McGavin said. “A lot has happened in the hours since poor Edmund Butler tragically met his end. A crime so awful but calculated, and designed to place each one of you under suspicion.”

The word “suspicion” caused Marcus to stop in his tracks.

“Su-su-su-spicion,” Marcus replied with a panic in his voice. “How, how, how ri-ri-posterous!”

“Riposterous?” asked McGavin, with a smirk on his face.

“I was going for ridiculous and then changed to preposterous,” Marcus replied, putting his nails into his mouth and beginning to walk up and down again.

“No wonder you are nervous. Hiding something?” McGavin asked. “You had every motive to kill your brother. The twin you were jealous of. The one that, by virtue of his slightly earlier birth, inherited the house, had the successful career and lived in luxury, whilst you struggled for every penny.”

Marcus stopped again and turned around. Our Detective’s first theory seems to have given the suspect back some confidence.

“Now that is actually ridiculous. He was alone and collected stamps. Why would I be jealous of him?” Marcus replied.

McGavin turned to the younger lady, Jane Atkinson. For someone young her posture was good, she sat elegantly like a swan, her spine not affected by the slouch of modern youth.

“He wasn’t alone though, was he, Miss Atkinson? You served him as his Secretary, befriended him and became his closest confidante, without telling him your true motive. You were really his daughter!”

She turned slowly to look at the Detective and rolled her eyes purposefully. Had she rolled them any further, they would have fallen out of the back of her head.

“If I was her daughter, Detective,” she replied, “why would I need the cloak and daggers. I could get a paternity test, prove who I was and become a part of his family, without needing to lie.”

“Which brings me onto my next suspect,” the Detective said, as he turned to face the portly Nicholas Butler, son of the murdered Edmund. “You knew he was going to change his will tonight to add Miss Atkinson, and reduce what you thought was your rightful inheritance.”

Nicholas laughed loudly, almost bellowing at what he believed was the hilarity of the accusation.

“What kind of person changes their will late in the evening at the weekend? He would have needed witnesses, and you try getting a solicitor at the weekends,” Nicholas replied mockingly.

McGavin flicked over the page of his notebook. His confidence was not shaken by the challenges being made to his authority and his theories.

“Which brings me to you, Lady Katherine,” he said. “You knew that Edmund had money, and you were after his money to pay off your significant gambling debts.”

The assembled guests all looked at each other. They ignored McGavin for a moment. They turned.

And looked at me. Sat to one side of the stage, clutching my manuscript, they all looked at me.

“The Gambler’s Debt, seriously? This writing is so cliche. It’s 2026. Lady Katherine has a diverse portfolio of crypto investments and dividends from stocks.”

Marcus then looks at me and says “It all makes sense now. The jealous twin. The secret daughter. The changing will. God, it’s all so obvious.”

Felix decided now was the time to speak up. He stood up slowly and started gesturing towards me. “And you’re going to accuse me of some historical betrayal from our time fighting in the Gulf. Well, I’ve never been further East than Paris. What is this, an Andy McNab novel?”

Dr Jones was the final guest to contribute. “Don’t forget the straightforward blackmail plot. You’ll say I’ve been blackmailing him over something in his medical history that he didn’t want to be revealed. Mention our secret meetings. But he had stopped paying and was going to go to the Police. When in actual fact, he’s a hypochondriac who was paying me £250 to visit him every time he worried instead. I’d just end up giving him a leaflet.”

McGavin was looking dejected at this point. At least someone was taking this seriously. Me, on the other hand, well I’ve had enough.

“How dare you, all! I have put my life and soul into this play, and you have betrayed me right at the very end! And for what! You have spoiled it all before the big reveal!”

“But it doesn’t make sense,” an unknown man says. He’s stood up from his seat in the audience and he’s now having a go at me, along with the cast.

“If all six of them all had such obvious and equal motives, they all killed him, whilst at the same time he was murdered by no-one. We can’t trust you.”

McGavin sensed this was his time to shine. He’s going off script. He is going to try and inject some life into his performance and save the show!

He goes out of the door he entered through and pulls a flipchart onto the stage - the one we had been using backstage. He dramatically flips over the pages, skipping past several completed sheets and landing on an empty one. He picks up the marker and starts drawing circles, adding the names of the guests, some clues and our deceased victim at the centre.

“As you can see from this Venn diagram all of these points come together to start to form a hypothesis, clearly leading to the death of the suspect,” McGavin says.

“That’s not a Venn diagram,” Dr Jones replies. “None of them overlap. What you’ve done is basically draw bubbles.”

McGavin tears the sheet off and starts again.

Crime = suspect + motive + opportunity

Underneath he writes each of the suspects name and their motive but leaves their opportunity. He stops to scratch his head.

“He’s right, they all could have done it. But at the same time, they all couldn’t have, or didn’t.”

It’s time for my own creative edit. “McGavin turns around and walks out of the room, to the right,” I say, pretending to read it from my book. Thankfully, the Detective dutifully complies with the change of direction.

That, at least, gets rid of that problem.

There’s a knock on the other door at the other side of the room. The door opens and it’s our victim, Edmund. He strolls from one side of the stage to the other, purposefully. The assembled suspects are staring at him in disbelief and the audience starts to murmur disapprovingly.

“You see,” a female audience member says. “How can we trust this plot if the victim isn’t now dead?”

Edmund gets a mobile phone out from his pocket and shows it to the audience. “I am very much still dead,” he says. “We’ve still got to get round to how I was killed yet, how the room was locked from the inside and the twist. That’s a whole extra routine that this bumbling idiot of a narrator has got to get through yet. So I’m just going to pick up my Uber Eats and get back to being dead.”

My head is in my hands at this point as my career flashes before my eyes. I should have chosen someone else to narrate.

Both the assembled cast and audience all start to get up and leave. They all file out of the stage door, whilst at the same time the audience walks off towards the door at the back of the theatre.

Who then gets to find out who killed Edmund Butler?

But his Chinese food did smell good.